Feeling the mad heat of cooking up Shorts

Stuart Meltzer's eyes are aimed at the ceiling of a popular diner in Hollywood on the morning after what might have been the busiest, most satisfying weekend of his life.

He is listening to his boss, Stephanie Norman, describe how they ramped up City Theatre Company's annual Summer Shorts Festival for its lucky 13th year.

After listing their litany of accomplishments, Norman says, "Right now there's a lot of caffeine and Red Bull as we get to the finish line. It's crazy, dizzy, chaotic, but it's fantastic energy."

The duo had spent a weekend in which 30 plays were performed, including one marathon day that included every one plus a playwrights panel and a closed-door session with visiting VIPs to go over details for the 2009 festival.

Summer Shorts began its latest edition three weeks ago. The series wraps up with two shows today at Miami's Arsht Center and, while audiences are still heading home, begins a mad dash of packing and unpacking for a move to the Broward Center.

Summer Shorts has been condensed from three weekends to one over the years at the Broward's Amaturo Theatre. With 600 seats, it's three times as large as the Arsht's Studio or the Ring Theatre in Coral Gables, where it was held for many years. The schedule opens with a 10 a.m. matinee Wednesday of a special kids program, and runs through next Sunday.

Although the shorter four-day Broward schedule is a physical reduction, Norman says that audiences have steadily grown more consistently and faster in Broward than in Miami. She anticipates this week's arrival with a whole new package of "Shorts 4 Kids" will offer an appealing new option to parents.

Norman has three children, the first of which she was pregnant with during the inaugural festival in 1996. The company she co-founded has taken youth-oriented short plays to civic halls, summer camps and service groups over the years but didn't have family shows as part of the festival lineup itself.

That changed big time this month with the full-length Shorts 4 Kids program, whose matinees so far have been packed with families as well as children bused in from those summer camps. There will be five performances Thursday through Saturday - more than either of the two main attractions, Programs A and B of what's now called "Signature Shorts."

The kids program has five plays of its own that Norman and Meltzer adamantly describe as classy and smart. Norman noted that Go, Diego, Go Live! was playing across the hall at the Arsht Center last week, the kind of event that she describes as commuting to watch a TV show.

"We're not pandering. We're not doing fairy tale, and we're not selling overpriced backpacks in the lobby," she says. "We're giving a real quality experience, and smart writing."

Also new this year is a collection of eight short plays called "UnderShorts," a late-night event with sharper humor, more sexuality, and social and political incorrectness. With those, the overall festival nearly doubled this year's content to 30 plays.

In all, the festival has works by 26 writers spread among 15 directors utilizing a repertory company of 11 actors.

But the logistics of bringing them all to Broward as part of this first-year expansion were too daunting. And the company feels it needs time to plan its development of the late-night audience in Broward. Thus, UnderShorts closed out Saturday night at the Arsht.

The main product this year adds more polish to the Summer Shorts collection. Many of the plays are slightly longer but still hover around the 10-minute ideal, ranging from poignant to bittersweet, whimsical to hilarious, with occasional tragic punctuation. The authors range from the internationally known (David Mamet, Paul Rudnick) to regional veterans (Michael McKeever, Susan Westfall).

Meltzer, the festival's artistic director, was appointed to chief cook during the last festival.

His selection was similar to most of his predecessors' over the years, elevated from the ranks of guest directors who put together a play or two or three.

Meltzer's goal was to be hands on, especially reading and choosing the finalists from among the more than 1,000 scripts being considered. He says he's accomplished that, and is still focused on keeping the festival an institution that serves the playwrights.

At the same time, he admits he didn't know "specifically" just how much he was biting off.

Those before him in the hot seat have said as much - notably a refrain that goes something like this: No matter how much you prepare in advance, there's no way to be ready for all that needs to be done when production actually begins in the spring.

And the big move to Broward is yet to come, where over the next three days the shows have to be adapted from the Arsht's intimate environment, with the audience on three sides, to the Amaturo's traditional raised stage and the audience down front.